


It's the bitter taste of losing everything

by muselives



Category: Fringe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-29
Updated: 2010-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-06 22:56:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muselives/pseuds/muselives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Survivors of an cataclysmic event, Amy blames Nick for her husband's death. [<a href="http://oxoniensis.dreamwidth.org/26521.html">Porn Battle IX</a>, Fringe, Nick/Amy, unexepected | Trash the Dress, <a href="http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk218/muse_etc/trashthedress/solo/ss-091001-trashdress-20ss_full.jpg">picture</a>]</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's the bitter taste of losing everything

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to [](http://lo-duclavier.livejournal.com/profile)[**lo_duclavier**](http://lo-duclavier.livejournal.com/) for keeping me excited about these characters and this pairing. Posted for Porn Battle [here](http://oxoniensis.dreamwidth.org/26521.html?thread=3012505#cmt3012505). FBI Nick AU. Spoilers through the second season. Beta courtesy of [](http://chichuri.livejournal.com/profile)[**chichuri**](http://chichuri.livejournal.com/).

"Get up."

The voice is Nick's and in the relative, sudden silence Amy is aware that they are the only ones in the church breathing. Quiet--too much quiet--is pressing down on her until she can't breathe.

"I can't hold this beam up much longer." Nick's words are controlled, impatient. He's so far away. "Amy, don't you dare give up on me now."

Crawl, she commands her limbs. Roll over onto her hands and knees--damn the dress, it's already ruined--and just crawl.

But her hand lands in the warm, solid center of her husband's torso. Horror and comprehension mingle as the blood stains her palm. Gavin, alive and smiling, swearing himself to her not even an hour ago--purple, graying, dead. She chokes back tears because she can hear Nick straining with the beam. Grief will have to wait.

Once she's out from under the altar, Nick lets the beam fall again with a heavy woosh of breath. He looks at the dead man with that keen focus he's turned on many crime scenes before. "He saved your life, didn't he? Threw you under the altar. He's lucky it didn't break."

She refuses to look back at the old marble altar where she took first communion, where she swore her wedding vows. Shedding her high heels somewhere in the wreckage, she climbs over bodies and rubble barefoot, not stopping when she escapes the church walls but running through the destruction of Boston until her trembling legs give out. She sinks down, destruction spread before her to all four corners, and the first hiccup of a sob escapes her.

*

Amy flees from the church in a relatively straight line. Nick notes it because he won't be able to catch up with her and he accepts with an angry, grudging sigh that he may have just lost the last living person in Boston.

The destruction was swift, incomprehensible. Broyles barely had time to send him out before it destroyed headquarters behind him.

He tries not to think of Amy's mother and father, her fiance-husband, the members of their wedding all dead or dying in the wreckage of the church. He only murmurs the prayer of the faithful departed as he tears down one of the decorative banisters.

His leg is bad but after a little field first aid he's healed enough to go after her.

She's sitting in a junkyard. It's striking because what once would have looked out of place in the city now seems to blend with its surroundings. His eyes sweep over her form, noting no major abrasions, noting the perfect fit of her dress.

"Amy. _Amy_."

She looks up at him and her hollow brown eyes begin to fill. Anger. Guilt. Helplessness.

"Can you walk?" he says, more for the sound of his voice than out of any real doubt. "We have to look for survivors."

Her voice is choked. "Gavin's dead."

"I know." The words, colder than he means them, bring her to her feet abruptly. He feels the impact of her hand on his cheek, lets his head whip sideways with the force.

When he looks back, she's moving again towards a Camry that looks like it escaped most of the destruction. Her train is dragging in the dust and the sun has started sinking low and red in the distant sky. He thinks she's beautiful. He's glad she told him not to come to her wedding.

By sunrise, they're out of Massachusetts. The silence is like the torn up pavement stretching out before them: it has to end somewhere but neither knows when.

*

Nick finds a relatively intact apartment unit. No other survivors, certainly none to prevent them from claiming it as their own. He raids the fridge the first night they're there then begins to forage in adjoining quarters until they've stockpiled enough to last them a month.

Most amazing is the bathtub, a knock-off of an old antique style, big enough for four people, a total extravagance. The water pipes no longer work but Nick finds ways to bring up water. One day he leads her to the doorway and shows her his accomplishment: the tub is full and the faint curl of steam says the water is hot. "Thought it might help," is all he tells her before disappearing to the second bedroom.

Amy runs her hands down the front of her wedding dress. It's torn, dirty, stained with sweat. What should have been a beautiful extravagance mothballed in her closet is now the only piece of clothing she has worn for more than a week.

Her fingers stumble for the zipper for a moment before she gives up the farce.

In seconds, she slips into the tub and under the water, wedding dress and all.

*

He pinches her nose, tilts back her head, and breathes into her mouth. Without hesitation, he administers the pumps to her ribcage, counting the time under his breath. "Breathe," he commands with a forceful push.

She jerks up violently and gags out the bathwater. Spluttering for air, she rolls onto her side.

His heart is racing. His body is tense with anger and fear. Nothing in his life, _nothing_, compares to the crashing relief bearing down on his body right now.

Still his mouth twists open and he hears himself tell her. "Suicide is a mortal sin."

Amy, pale and shaking, lets out a hoarse sob.

He leaves her on the bathroom floor, leaves the door open so he can hear her. She sobs for the better part of two hours. Then her breathing evens out and he finally allows himself to sleep.

*

When she wakes up, she wonders why she is so cold. Has Gavin gone into work early? But an experimental touch of her hand yields the solid surface of the bathroom floor and not the rumpled softness of sheets on a mattress. Reality settles into stillness.

No matter how she tries she cannot reach the zipper. In the end, she takes a knife from the kitchen and cuts her way out. Her dress, somewhat dry, falls down into a puddle around her feet. She steps her way clear and strides purposefully into Nick's room.

*

Instinct and training are what prepare him for the knife. He has to twist the sheets around her wrist and even then she's hard to control. Amy Jessup is no slip of a woman and it takes all of his strength to wrest her improvised weapon away.

Except she's not Amy Jessup any longer. She's not in her wedding dress either.

It's wrong that after all they've been through, the grief, the anger, the pain, he can feel himself responding to the clean symmetry and shape of her body. It's wrong that after he broke her heart that he doesn't want to lose her, that he jealously hopes no one else is living because he's afraid she will leave him.

He pins her and his cock strains against his jeans, pressing into her thigh. Her eyes widen and she chokes out, "You sick bastard."

The air is heavy with old feelings and animal impulses. They stay locked like that for a moment before he finally lets her go. She moves towards the door and stops again, staring at him with disbelief and hunger.

He meets her gaze with cool defiance. "If you want to leave, Amy, leave. Just don't kill yourself to get away."

*

She ventures no further than the adjoining apartments on the floor. Most of her finds are useless but one woman approximately her size has left behind enough clothing for her to start dressing herself again. She still wears less than she needs to, a sort of stubborn contest with Nick in a world where propriety has been shot to hell.

It's not until one humid afternoon that she gets the upper hand. He comes home and finds her wearing only his old button down shirt. The desire etched in his whole frame is so painfully obvious that she feels no guilt with her triumphant smirk.

"You still want me." She can't suppress the note of surprise that escapes with that boast.

Gavin never could make her insides twist with heat and need the way Nick can with just that look. There is no anger, no resentment in those pale blue eyes as Nick replies, "You could wiggle your little finger and I'd probably get hard."

Shocked, she lets him leave, taking with him the last word.

*

He thinks about her at all times and wonders if she even notices the gold band still clasped to her finger.

He dreams about what it would have been like if he'd married her, how he would have slipped her out of that extravagant white dress and worshiped her body with his mouth. He thinks about it when he jerks off, when he listens to her come in the other room through the ministrations of her own hands. He wonders how long they can continue before something has to change.

*

She gets a little carried away one night and she's sure that her moaning carries beyond her bedroom's four walls. She's certain she hears the thud of Nick's feet on the floor but after waiting, she doesn't hear him move towards her door.

Frustrated, she throws off the sheets and goes to his room. He's sitting on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. He looks more like he's about to imitate the thinker then try to jump her bones. "Well?" she asks impatient, still turned on.

His eyes fall with heavy significance to the ring.

Her skin takes on a new flush but this time with embarrassment. "I'm a widow, Nick," she says and abruptly she tugs the ring off. "I know that, you know that, and now you know I know." Her mood is jumbled so she leaves quickly and shuts her door behind her with a slam. After the echoes die out through the house, she looks at the ring in her hand. She drops it into her nightstand drawer before she lies down on her bed. Hearing nothing but her own breathing, she slowly falls back asleep.

*

He still waits.

They talk about leaving. They talk about preparing for winter. They talk about the past and the mistakes and the way things should have been.

He wants her so badly that it aches, the dull lingering ache of a badly healed wound. He can find at least three times a day that he could take her and she'd give in without a second thought.

But she's the one who has to come to terms with the grief.

So he waits.

*

They cross paths in the bathroom for the first time. Odd that in the months living together they've managed until now to avoid it.

Her eyes trace down his naked body and stop on his left leg. For the first time she sees that it has a wide, ugly scar. "When--?" she starts to ask, losing the question even as it forms.

"When everything happened," he says, not needing to clarify the disaster that divides their life sharply into before and after. "Some of the roof wasn't finished falling in. It hurt like a bitch but I had to find you."

"I could have been dead," she answers, feeling her grip on her robe begin to loosen.

His eyes stay on hers. "I knew you were alive."

"How?" she whispers.

He shakes his head. "I just knew."

*

He's three steps from his door when he hears her breathe, "Nick--"

He turns and her robe is open, her mouth still open. She pulls him down into a kiss while his hands find their way to her newly exposed skin. Her groan reverberates in his mouth as he palms her breast and in a moment they've shed her robe and landed on the couch.

She straddles him and shows no hesitation to sink deliberately onto his cock, taking him without any further foreplay. Her body spasms and she gasps with pleasure. "More," she demands and he holds her hips as she draws him in deeper. "More, more, more," she keeps chanting until their rhythm leaves her too breathless and all there are are the inarticulate sounds of satisfaction.

He comes first but he rolls her over and uses his mouth to lick her clean. The tension within her keeps on building until he slides his fingers into her and brings her to her own orgasm. Her shuddering cry makes him want her all over again.

*

After a second, slower coupling, they lie there, slick with sweat and finally sated. She settles against his chest, ear over his heart and lets out a little contented sigh. "Thank you," she whispers. "For saving my life."

"Any time," he promises and his heartbeat mellows to a steady lullaby. The sound washes over her, through her, and the world, no longer silent, fades from her mind.


End file.
